All good things must come to an end. For Tuesday, December 13, our last class of the semester, please do the following:

(1) Watch O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Ethan and Joel Coen, 2000), taking notes as you see
fit. In addition to the DVD being reserved at the library, the film is also streaming
on Amazon.

(2) Read Janice Siegel's exhaustive essay, "The Coens’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Homer’s Odyssey,"
which elucidates just about every possible parallel between the film and the epic poem. Hers is important work, given the Coens' testimony that they'd never bothered to read the Odyssey. Siegel proves the brothers to be artful, Odysseus-like double-dealers.

And, yes, the piece is many pages long, but (a) they're small, journal-sized pages, and (b) the article itself is very accessible, if not downright breezy. You'll be glad you took the time.

(3) Remember by noon on Tuesday to comment on this post with your choice of a sequence from O Brother to view in class.

Friday, December 2, 2016

A friendly reminder that the fourth milestone of our semester project, the rough draft,
is due via email by 11:00 p.m. Watch your inboxes for an invitation to sign up for meetings with me to discuss your draft starting on Monday, December 12. (This meeting will constitute the fifth milestone.)

Details are available on the Project web page, but remember to submit your work as a double-spaced PDF with numbered pages and one-inch margins.

(1) Watch Ulysses(Mario Camerini, 1954), taking notes as you see
fit. In addition to the DVD being reserved at the library, the film is
also streaming on Amazon. Like Helen of Troy two years, later, this Italian-language film is one of the forerunners of the peplum genre.

Why they don't hire me to do taglines, part 1: Before he was Spartacus, Kirk Douglas was...ULYSSES!

Why they don't hire me..., part 2: Before she was Helen of Troy, Rossana Podestà was...NAUSICAA!

(2) Remember by noon on Thursday to comment on this post with your choice of a sequence from Ulysses to view in class.

For Tuesday, December 6, we're going to take a chronological step backward and consider a film that deals with events from before the Trojan War. Please do the following:

(1) Watch Iphigenia (Michael Cacoyannis, 1977), taking notes as you see
fit. The DVD is reserved at the library, BUT the film is NOT streaming on Amazon, Hulu or Netflix. It is available on YouTube in versions of varying quality. Make sure you get a version with English subtitles (it's a modern Greek-language film, like A Dream of Passion).

Being an adaptation of Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis, this film shares many of the same concerns as adaptations of the Medea. The movie overall is a feel-bad experience in the best possible way, cathartic in a most Aristotelian sense.

(2) Read Marianne McDonald's essay, "Eye of the Camera, Eye of the Victim," which offers a cogent analysis of the film in light of Euripides' play, as well as a personal response to Iphigenia's tragedy. Note: Her essay comes from Classical Myth and Culture in the Cinema (Oxford, 2001), one of the first major volumes combining Classical Studies and film studies, edited by Martin M. Winkler (who would go on to edit volumes on Gladiator and Troy).

(3) Remember by noon on Tuesday to comment on this post with your choice of a sequence from Iphigenia to view in class.

Tuesday, November 22, 2016

A friendly reminder that the third milestone of our semester project, the annotated bibliography,
is due via email by 11:00 p.m. Also remember that a tweaked version of your overall bibliography (with mini-thesis) is also due.

Details are available on the Project web page, but remember to submit your work as a double-spaced PDF with numbered pages and one-inch margins.

(1) Watch Troy (Wolfgang Peterson, 2004), taking notes as you see
fit. In addition to the DVD being reserved at the library, the film is
also streaming on Amazon. Remember as you watch that this movie was conceived in the full fervor of post-Gladiator fever.

(3) Read Monica Cyrino's essay, "Helen of Troy" (2007), a pivotal piece in a scholarly volume specifically conceived in response to the film (one of several such volumes edited by the prolific Martin L. Winkler).

(4) Remember by noon on Thursday to comment on this post with your choice of a sequence from Troy to view in class.